Following the most-recent US presidential election of Donald Trump, many people have been examining their social media preferences. The always-awful Twitter has become increasingly dreadful since Elon Musk took over, reaching a zenith during the election when its owner used the site as a propaganda machine from the Republican Party. Wanting to take the power out of Musk’s hands, many are now abandoning his platform in favour of Bluesky.
You know who isn’t abandoning it, though?
The weirdoes who suspect their accounts won’t gain much traction beyond Twitter – particularly the transphobic hordes who have made Musk’s website their base.
bluesky does the nuclear block, where if you block someone the entire conversation disappears from display
this has done wonders to upset transphobes who can now just be told to fuck off and it sticks https://t.co/z9YrnEQDBR
— your #1 source for absurdist true crime 🐀 🐍👑 🌷 (@davidgerard) October 18, 2024
The tweet-to-TERF pipeline blown up by Bluesky
The acronym TERF stands for ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminist’; i.e. a transphobic person. These people are often British, and don’t exist in significant numbers outside of the worst spaces imaginable – i.e. Twitter and the mainstream British media. Some have used phrases like “brain rot” to describe transphobia in that people who are radicalised by TERF ideology become increasingly weird, hateful, and obsessed. This is very obvious in some of the people we’ll be discussing here – first off, Wings Over Scotland:
The legacy media is desperate to get you off Twitter and onto a platform where you can (and will) be immediately silenced if you say anything contentious. Like used to happen on Twitter. pic.twitter.com/7W2x17vKCL
— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) November 15, 2024
If you’re unfamiliar with Wings Over Scotland, it’s the blog of Stuart Campbell, who began his career promoting Scottish independence. Here’s how New Statesman described his rise in 2021:
The site was launched in 2011 after the SNP’s shock Holyrood majority, when the real prospect of independence gave the whole thought-world of Scottish politics a jolt of entropy and excitement. Identifying a gap in the market, Wings swiftly emerged as a fixture of pro-independence comment, a hyper-partisan media monitor with terrier persistence and a rottweiler bite.
Here’s how they described his fall in the same piece:
Today, the site is awash in transphobic vitriol and conspiracy theories, and the man who did most to radicalise the “alt-nat” worldview is winging away from mainstream reality. The site has been toxic for years – Campbell was banned from Twitter in late 2019 – but the rise and fall of Wings Over Scotland holds many lessons about the country’s changing media and political culture.
If you look at the Wings Twitter account today, it’s wall-to-wall transphobic content. Strange, no, from an account which was established to promote Scottish independence? It’s almost as if some sort of rot has become established in the man’s brain.
The New Statesman article actually gives us some idea of how this happened:
Wings was never tied to the SNP, but Campbell was a powerful media outrider before he became a liability, and finally a significant foe. Accusations of transphobia and misogyny – first levelled in 2013 by the pro-independence blog A Thousand Flowers – continued to mount. By 2020, Graham Campbell, the BAME Convener of the SNP’s ruling body, described Wings as “an alt-right fascistic platform”. The councillor for Glasgow, who is also the co-convenor of SNP Socialists, argued that supporting Wings was “incompatible” with civic nationalism.
This is common to many Twitter transphobes (especially the British ones for whatever reason). Many of them started out as outwardly progressive types, but they received pushback for perceived transphobia, and then the rot set in.
What younger readers should understand is that before the 2010s, very few people knew the term ‘transphobia’, because being transphobic was so normalised that we didn’t even really comprehend it existed (see movies like 1994’s Ace Ventura). For most of us, then, it’s been a journey of hearing from trans people, examining our earlier positions, and growing into better people. For others, it’s been a journey in the opposite direction, with figures like Wings unable to accept they had bad opinions, and instead convincing themselves it’s the world which is wrong:
We refer to this as a ‘journey’ rather than ‘stagnation’ because these people haven’t just defended an old joke they made back in 2008; they’ve travelled so far down the transphobia rabbit hole that they’re out-weirding the Mad Hatter.
This is how you go from advocating for Scottish independence to telling random trans women on Twitter that they’re men (something he does an awful lot):
You're a man, sir.
— Wings Over Scotland (@WingsScotland) October 15, 2024
Glinner
You may have noticed that the article above stated that Wings “was banned from Twitter”. This is true, but he returned after Musk bought the platform and reinstated many banned accounts (an event similar to a Batman comic in which all the super villains escape from Arkham Asylum). One of those who returned to the site was one-time British comedy writer Graham Linehan.
Linehan, the creator of Father Ted and The IT Crowd, was once a well-respected progressive on Twitter. So what led him down the path of transphobia? Specifically, it seems to have been criticism of a 2008 episode of The IT Crowd – criticism which came a decade later. As Screen Rant wrote in 2024:
Throughout the episode of the Graham Lineham show — now known online as the “IT Crowd trans episode” for all the wrong reasons — various gags poke fun at trans women and undermine their identity. A musical montage shows April and Douglas doing various “masculine” activities, such as drinking beer or watching sports, which was meant to make a joke about April being a “typical man” on the inside. There are many sitcoms that made jokes now considered offensive, but the clear undercurrents of venom in The IT Crowd trans episode are uncomfortable, distressing, and can’t be excused with historical context.
For the reasons stated above, we’d argue that historical context does go some way towards excusing the episode. As noted, very few people thought of the episode as transphobic at the time, because transphobia was the default position, with no public push back. The issue is that Linehan refused to acknowledge the very obvious transphobia even with the benefit of hindsight. As Screen Rant reported:
With a growing trend of violence against trans women, audiences started to speak out against the episode, which trivializes the issue for cheap laughs. Channel 4 decided to pull The IT Crowd trans episode from their streaming service in 2020 after numerous complaints about the blatant transphobia it displayed. Creator Graham Linehan was furious about this, publishing on his blog that the decision infringed upon his freedom of speech. He also vowed to never work with Channel 4 again until it was reinstated.
Before the backlash to the episode grew, we remember seeing tweets from IT Crowd fans politely asking Linehan what he thought of that episode (tweets from before his first ban). From what we remember, Linehan disagreed with the sentiment that it was transphobic, but he did so with civility. World’s apart from how he behaves now, with the man living, breathing, and frothing transphobia at every available opportunity:
Bog-standard blokey comedy from a bloke. But he's a man with frankenboobs so it's actually progressive! https://t.co/9SBHMLVULq
— Graham Linehan 🎗️ (@Glinner) November 16, 2024
While Linehan regularly expresses his disdain for the sort of people leaving Twitter for Bluesky, he’s also following them there (almost as if he has nothing better to do than harass people):
You'll be banned in no time and that will immediately prove that BlueSky is just like old Twitter with all the same biases.
— Chris Strange (@chrisbizarre2) November 16, 2024
People on Bluesky are already accounting for how to deal with TERFs like Linehan:
With the insane growth of this site comes the inevitable trickle of disgusting nazi accounts like Glinner. The difference is that we learn from our errors on "X". Don't hate follow, don't engage and trust the moderators to take action over here.
— Jack D 🏳️🌈 (@jackdunc1.bsky.social) 2024-11-16T19:16:14.660Z
i just blocked glinner. i don't see the point in giving him the attention he craves.that's the only reason for someone like him to come here.
— รℓσαɳε ℓყรɓεƭɦ 🏳️🌈 (@sloanefragment.bsky.social) 2024-11-16T19:06:05.370Z
List of British arseholes you should block. Including JKR and Glinner. bsky.app/profile/did:…
— laurence 🇪🇺 (@laurencec123.bsky.social) 2024-11-16T19:17:24.545Z
You could call this an echo chamber. At the same time, we all witnessed the shitty opinions of people like Linehan echo and amplify on Twitter, and we know that listening to them scream about trans people a million times over only made them worse. In other words, Twitter served as an echo chamber regardless of how many voices screamed in parallel.
This phenomenon was neatly summed up by @dril:
go ahead. keep screaming "Shut The Fuck Up " at me. it only makes my opinions Worse
— Listen here Nomb Nuts (@dril) March 10, 2018
Of course, some probably can’t resist the urge to dunk on Linehan – a man whose dedication to transphobia led to the complete breakdown of his career and marriage:
Me: I will not argue with transphobes here I will not argue with transphobes here I will not argue with transphobes here I will not argue with transphobes here Glinner: [joins Bluesky]Me: Hey lil buddy how’s the wife
— Sam (he/him) (@mushycrouton.bsky.social) 2024-11-16T19:19:54.718Z
Linehan is encouraging the idea that non-transphobes are leaving Twitter because they know they’re wrong:
— Graham Linehan 🎗️ (@Glinner) November 17, 2024
He’s still utterly convinced he’s right, despite losing his career, his family, and his ability to think about anything other than trans people. This is what happens to a person when they’re unable to acknowledge that they were wrong about something.
The episode was very obviously transphobic, Graham! You didn’t know it at the time, but with hindsight you could have acknowledged that and moved on. Instead, you’ve let your brain rot.
Rowling with it
The world’s most famous transphobe hasn’t said much about Bluesky, but she did say this:
Thank you, Mu, for being the only person leaving for Bluesky who hasn't felt the need to post a long, solemn statement that implies you're withdrawing peacekeeping troops from a conflict zone.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) November 15, 2024
Much like Wings and Linehan, Rowling was a broadly progressive person who found themselves captured by transphobic brain rot. While we’re also not in favour of long, solemn statements, it’s hard to imagine that Rowling wouldn’t be one of the first to leave Musk’s Twitter if it wasn’t the home of transphobia.
So what was her transphobic origin story?
This is conjecture, but it’s probably an inability to deal with criticism of her Harry Potter books, as per this selection discussed by Viktorie Goldmannová:
The books are filled with problematic aspects that I, as a young reader loving every word, never realized.
But one of the worst is the character of Rita Skeeter, a reporter for the Daily Prophet which is the newspaper in the wizarding world.
Rita is described as having mannish hands, a heavily jawed face, very fake nails and very fake hair. She is also an unregistered animagus, or a person who is able to change form into an animal.
Rita uses this advantage of hers to spy on children to get information for the news.
I believe Rita’s whole character is the embodiment of a terrible and disgusting stereotype about trans women, especially with Rowling’s latest tweets that prove her transphobia.
Rowling’s books were always filled with unpleasant descriptions of characters, with fellow author Ursula K. Le Guin describing her as “ethically rather mean-spirited”. We also know that Rowling always had a hard time accepting criticism. Her descriptions of overweight people were particularly grim, but she hit back at these accusations, arguing that she didn’t have a problem because some of her good characters were also overweight. For reference, this is a description of a child from one of her books:
Dudley looked a lot like Uncle Vernon. He had a large, pink face, not much neck, small watery blue eyes and thick, blond hair that lay smoothly on his thick, fat head… Harry often said that Dudley looked like a pig in a wig.
As with the above, this sort of thing was a lot more normal when Rowling wrote it, and she could have just acknowledged the issue and grown from it. These people don’t grow, though; their brains just rot, and rot, and rot. And given that, it’s no wonder people don’t want to watch their decline any longer.
Final notes on Bluesky
It should be noted that while we understand the desire to switch social media platforms, we’re not giving Bluesky our unbridled backing. This, for instance, is very troubling:
Bluesky is apparently deleting the accounts of Palestinians in Gaza under the guise of “spam.” Requests to correct this have so far gone unanswered. https://t.co/vbBfz8TFL2 pic.twitter.com/X4o7OifWlh
— Writers Against the War on Gaza (@wawog_now) November 14, 2024
Moreover, Bluesky already feels a bit like how social media would look if a non-TERF version of the Guardian was running it. It’s very liberal, very centrist, and very ‘don’t rock the boat too much’.
We’ll be keeping an eye on this, and for the moment we’ll be posting to both Twitter and Bluesky. We look forward to engaging with you wherever you end up.
Amazing young people standing for justice and humanity
Featured image via the Canary
